Well, this dated quickly!

I was thinking about the increasing automation of factories. Thinks like car manufacturing ing particular, and seeing the day when all would be controlled by automation. Pistons and transistors. Like many, the days of personal computers was not visible.

When I started my degree in 1973, computing was offered as a short, optional course at Sydney University (6 weeks if I remember quickly) for first year science students, to give you a taste of it. I couldn't be bothered. Too much time, no return for a person who wanted to be a biochemist. Everything in those days was punched cards.

In 1980, my boss tried to get some computing for our laboratory, but we were knocked back by the computing boffins of NSW health. Not big enough, not enough savings. With 25,000+ samples per year, doing analytical testing for dozens if not hundreds of drugs, having to hand write, stamp, manually attach labels, do manual lists of patients (which could not be searched), etc, we would have probably saved the equivalent of 2 people, if not more. John, my boss was a stubborn man.

In 1981, he managed to get a "statistical add-on" for one of our analytical machines. I.e. an Apple II, with 48K of memory, and a floppy disc drive that could store about 100K per disk. I was put in charge of programming the statistics to suit us. I mastered that and negotiated adding computing to my part time maths degree, meaning I had time to go up to Macquarie University (10 minutes drive) during the day, rather than doing it by night or correspondence. Got me out of work for about 90 minutes 3 days a week and broke up the day.

As it turned out, I had a knack for computing. By then, we still programmed into a room size computer, but sat at terminals. No more cards to lose or get out of order. After about 5 weeks or so, I was called in to have a discussion by our tutor, who asked me where I had learnt a particular technique (using loops and flags.) I told him I'd picked it up programming the Apple, and it seemed to work fine in Fortran too. That was fine, I got my A for the assignment (and later the course), but was asked to stick with the techniques that we were taught as we were taught them. Them couldn't cope with someone who got ahead of them. I chose not to continue with Computing 2. All this time, John was asking me to design a Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) for the lab on our tiny Apple II. I kept saying "Can't be done, I've only got 48K of memory for programming AND data on the computer, and about 100K for storage. But we can do other useful things with it"

Along the way, one of the lecturers belittled Basic, and I was writing stuff in AppleBasic back at work. You couldn't, for example, write a word processor in Basic, he said confidently. Them's fighting words for me. So that was where I put my effort, because we needed a WP at work too. What I produced was not a true WP, but a functional text-editor, which was what most word processor of the day were anyway, and what I modelled mine on. It was a bit ugly, but it worked and improved productivity. With that as an encouragement, John managed to get another Apple II, with 64K memory this time and two floppy drives, plus a second for our original machine. And kept nagging me about the LIMS. Knowing nothing about maths or computing, he had confidence in me, so about a year after we got the first one, I told him to set aside time for me to do the programming, because I'd figured a sneaky way around the limitations. 

It worked. In the end we had 5 networked Apple IIs, each with dual floppies, along with a 20M and then a 30M hard drive, and a massive tape streamer for archiving. As well as Basic, I'd leant assembly language for things like searching and sorting, which turned a half-hour job into a half-second one. And how to manually rewrite disk sectors that had been zapped by lightning strikes - north Ryde got lots of them. The thing held us together for about 6 years, processing over 100,000 samples per year, until we had it replaced by a more powerful network and a professional programmer, who modelled the basic bones of the new system on what I had designed (but much smother).

When he looked into what I had done, he was a bit like my tutor. "Where did you learn about relational database programming, he asked. To which I replied "What the hell is a relational database?" It appeared I had reinvented that particular tool, because most PCs just used flat file databases. But the only way I could get all the programs that we needed to run on a computer that didn't have space for them was to swap things back and forth over the two floppies and the computer memory (and later, the hard discs were just a more convenient form.) It appears I have a bit of a knack for programming.

But not so much for looking ahead in 1976. I could sort of imagine computers the size of a room shrinking in size and increasing in power, but not to the extent that it did and continues to do. Dick Tracey watch phones? Colour streaming TV in a portable device the size of a notebook with access to most of the information in the world? Playing any of a million songs at the drop of a hat on the same machine? My poem was redundant before the next millennium.

No rhymes or meter or regular form. Just free verse.